NBA Commissioner Adam Silver has made no bones about it. He’s looking at the idea of adding another franchise. One possibility is the desert metropolis that is Las Vegas. The NHL’s Golden Knights earned a Stanley Cup Finals appearance in their initial season. Meanwhile, the Oakland Raiders will soon be calling Vegas home.
As one of the newer metropolitan communities in the United States, Vegas and its suburbs have grown leaps and bounds in recent decades. That’s helped the sports community team up a sprawling gambling mecca with professional organizations.
Taking part in Team USA training camp in Vegas this week, recently re-signed Oklahoma City Thunder forward Paul George indicated that Vegas itself is a perfect next location for NBA basketball.
“They’ve got hockey here, and they’ve got WNBA here, the NFL will be here in a couple of years,” George said, via the Las Vegas Review-Journal . “I think Vegas is built for an NBA team. I think they should be here. It has everything. It’s easy access from the airport down to the Strip. I don’t see why not.”
With the master-built communities surrounding Vegas and the airport itself being adjacent to both the strip and said suburbs, George is not wrong here. It’s legitimately the ideal destination for an expansion team.
As the NBA looks into the possibility of expanding, both Vegas and Seattle has come up at the forefront of conversations.
The overreaching issue here for Seattle is that its west coast counterpart already has an arena that can host an NBA team.
It’s certainly going to be something to pay attention to in the coming months and years. With the Vegas-area population growing and communities being built up all around it, we wouldn’t be surprised if the city hosted the NBA’s 31st franchise here soon.